Early years

Smith came from an unremarkable New England family. His grandfather, Asael Smith, lost most of his property in Topsfield, Massachusetts, during the economic downturn of the 1780s and eventually moved to Vermont, where Smith’s father, Joseph Smith, Sr., established himself as a farmer. After the birth of Joseph Smith, Jr., a series of crop failures forced the family to move to Palmyra, New York. His mother, Lucy Mack, came from a Connecticut family that had disengaged from conventional Congregationalism and leaned toward Seekerism, a movement that looked for a new revelation to restore true Christianity. Although privately religious, the family rarely attended church, and after they moved to Palmyra they became involved in magic and treasure-seeking. Lucy Smith attended Presbyterian meetings, but her husband refused to accompany her, and Joseph, Jr., remained at home with his father.

Palmyra: boyhood home of Joseph SmithRestored boyhood home of Joseph Smith, Palmyra, New York.JonRidinger

Religious differences within the family and over religious revivals in the Palmyra area left Smith perplexed about where to find a church. When he was 14, he prayed for help, and, according to his own account, God and Jesus appeared to him. In answer to his question about which was the right church, they told him that all the churches were wrong. Although a local minister to whom he related the vision dismissed it as a delusion, Smith continued to believe in its authenticity. In 1823 he received another revelation: while praying for forgiveness, he later reported, an angel calling himself Moroni appeared in his bedroom and told him about a set of golden plates containing a record of the ancient inhabitants of America. Smith found the plates buried in a stone box not far from his father’s farm. Four years later, the angel permitted him to remove the plates and instructed him to translate the characters engraved on their surfaces with the aid of special stones called “interpreters.” Smith insisted that he did not compose the book but merely “translated” it under divine guidance. Completing the work in less than 90 days, he published it in March 1830 as a 588-page volume called the Book of Mormon.

The Book of Mormon told the 1,000-year history of the Israelites, who were led from Jerusalem to a promised land in the Western Hemisphere. In their new home, they built a civilization, fought wars, heard the word of prophets, and received a visit from Christ after his resurrection. The book resembled the Bible in its length and complexity and in its division into books named for individual prophets. According to the book itself, one of the prophets, a general named Mormon, abridged and assembled the records of his people, engraving the history on gold plates. Later, about 400 ce, the record keepers, known as Nephites, were wiped out by their enemies, the Lamanites, presumably the ancestors of the American Indians.

Emergence of the church

Establishment of settlements and persecution

On April 6, 1830, Smith organized a few dozen believers into a church. From then on, his great project was to gather people into settlements, called “cities of Zion,” where they would find refuge from the calamities of the last days. Male converts were ordained and sent out to make more converts, a missionary program that resulted in tens of thousands of conversions by the end of Smith’s life. Members of the church, known as Saints, gathered first at Independence, Missouri, on the western edge of American settlement. When other settlers found their presence intolerable, the Saints were forced to move to other counties in the state. Meanwhile, Smith moved his family to another gathering place in Kirtland, Ohio, near Cleveland.

None of these communities survived, however, because the Mormons were expelled as soon as their increasing numbers threatened to give them political control of the towns in which they settled. Non-Mormons tolerated a handful of “religious fanatics” in their midst but found dominance by the Mormons to be unbearable. Smith fled Kirtland for Far West, Missouri, in 1838, but opposition arose once more. In 1838, facing expulsion for a third time, Smith tried to defend the church with arms. In response, local Missourians rose up in wrath, and the governor ordered that the Mormons be driven out of the state or, where that was not possible, exterminated. In November 1838 Smith was imprisoned on charges of robbery, arson, and treason, and he probably would have been executed had he not escaped and fled to Illinois.

The Mormons came together in the nearly abandoned town of Commerce on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River. Renaming the site Nauvoo (a Hebrew word meaning “Beautiful Place”), Smith built his most successful settlement, complete with a temple (finished only after Smith’s death) on a bluff overlooking the town. Attracting converts from Europe as well as the United States, Nauvoo grew to rival Chicago as the largest city in the state.

Teachings

Mormons believed that Smith’s actions were directed by revelation. When questions arose, he would call upon God and dictate words in the voice of the Lord. Sometimes the revelations gave practical instructions; others explained the nature of heaven or the responsibilities of the priesthood. All Smith’s revelations were carefully recorded and preserved. In 1835 Smith published the first 65 revelations in a volume titled the Book of Commandments, later called the Doctrine and Covenants. While believing in the Bible, like all Christians, Smith broke its monopoly on the word of God. The Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants were added to the canon of scripture, and Smith spoke as if more revelations and translations would accumulate in the future.

Smith’s teachings departed from conventional Christian traditions by incorporating certain practices from the Hebrew Bible (see alsoOld Testament). The temples he built (in Smith’s lifetime, two were erected and two more were planned) were modeled on the temples of ancient Israel. He appointed his male followers to priesthoods, named for the biblical figures Melchizedek and Aaron, that were overseen by the office of high priest. In the temples, he instituted rituals of washing and anointing taken from instructions in the Book of Exodus for consecrating priests. Justifying the practice of polygamy by reference to the precedent of Abraham, the first of the Hebrew patriarchs, Smith was “sealed” (the ceremony that binds men and women in marriage for eternity) to about 30 wives, though no known children came from these unions. As in the Bible, men took the leading roles in church affairs, but by the end of his life Smith taught that men and women were redeemed together through eternal marriage. At the heart of his teachings was a confidence in the spiritual potential of common people. He believed that every man could be a priest and that everyone had in him the possibility of the divine. The purpose of the temple rituals was to give people the knowledge they needed to enter God’s presence and to become like God.

Character and final years

Smith was not a polished preacher. It was the originality of his views, an outsider commented, that made his discourse fascinating. Absolutely resolute in all of his projects, he never became discouraged, even under the most trying circumstances. Nor did people of higher social standing intimidate him; he appeared to think of himself as the equal of anyone, as demonstrated when he ran for president of the United States in 1844.

He married Emma Hale in 1827, when he was 21 years old and she 22. The couple adopted twins and had nine of their own children, five of whom died in infancy. Their devotion to each other was sorely tried by the practice of polygamy. Emma believed in her husband’s calling but could not abide additional wives. She remained faithful to him to the end, however, and after his death wore a lock of his hair on her person.

When Mormon dissenters published a reform newspaper in Nauvoo that Smith felt disturbed the peace, he ordered it suppressed. Meanwhile, non-Mormon hostility in the surrounding county had been growing for the usual reasons, and when the press was closed, irate local citizens brought charges of promoting riot against Smith and his brother Hyrum. The two were taken to Carthage, the county seat, for a hearing, and while imprisoned they were shot by a mob on June 27, 1844. The leadership of the church then fell to Brigham Young, who dedicated himself to perpetuating Smith’s teachings and program. After the Mormons left Nauvoo in 1846, they migrated to Utah, where they constructed Salt Lake City on a pattern laid down by Joseph Smith for the cities of Zion.